Classism and the Final Solution For the Poor

"Classism For Dimwits" by Jacqueline S. Homan

We have the best democracy that money can buy: a democracy for the rich, that is. Since the rise of corporations as private for-profit entities, our system operates for the benefit of the rich at the expense of the poor and the working class. Throughout the 1960’s through the 1990’s, the US viz-a-viz the national security state, either directly fomented or backed bloody insurrections against popular reformist movements here — such as the American Indian Movement (AIM), MOVE, the Black Panthers, and the Nation of Islam (NOI) — as well as abroad against the people in El Salvador, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, San Salvador, Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, East Timor, and other lands.

The common denominator was that all these victims of capitalism were striving for social reforms and economic justice.

The nations that were brutalized by the national security state had popular reformist regimes that were attempting to redirect and redistribute some of their nations’ resources towards meeting the needs of the people instead of into the already overflowing coffers of exploitative multinational corporations. They were trying to develop a class order that posed a threat to the global capitalist economy and the existing class order within the US itself.

When we hear talk about “national security interests”, what we’re really hearing is talk of policies that favor the interests of the most privileged and powerful and making the world a safer place for that klepto-plutocracy at the expense of the masses of working class people at home and abroad.

The American poor and working class bears the heaviest burden of taxation that disproportionately supports the elite’s capital accumulation machination through subsidies, tax loop holes, and deficit spending that enriches a huge defense industry and sustains economic imperialism of global corporations through a brutal military apparatus and the CIA — but little to zero government deficit spending is directed to meet the social and economic needs of the poor and the working class.

Government assistance for the poor rarely reaches the neediest people. In the 1960’s, the Great Society programs saw $7 billion invested by federal, state, and local governments in the pockets of Third World poverty in the Appalachian region. But the majority of Appalachia’s poor remained unhelped because these anti-poverty measures served as a boon for the entrenched petit bourgeoisie interests — the merchants, banks, coal operators, and contractors. [Office of Economic Opportunity report quoted in the New York Times, November 29, 1970]

Workers’ comp, social security, unemployment benefits, and disability benefits distribute a lot more money to people from the middle class than to those with the most need: the poor. Social programs, before they were eliminated entirely or their budgets drastically cut, only reached a small fraction of those in need. In 1990, the $2.1 billion that went to the Supplemental Food Program for pregnant women, nursing mothers, infants and small children known as WIC, helped only half of those who were eligible. But nobody ever talks about the poor who have been turned away. Nobody even thinks about them. Nobody even cares.

The middle class and the decently paid unionized working class who aren’t badly off think that because there are government programs and charities, that there must be “all this help out there” for the poor and destitute. They never hear about the majority of the poor who are turned away, who aren’t getting helped. And truth be told, they really don’t want to know about it either.

Nobody cares about the poor. We are invisible. No one even acknowledges that we exist until we become a threat to the social order and pose to upset some middle class apple carts — or until enough middle class people fall into poverty and start to “feel the love.”

From 1980 – 1991, social programs (as miserly and inadequate as they were) for the nation’s poor and most disadvantaged were defunded and subjected to brutal budget cuts:

14.7% from maternal and child health care

69% from job training and subsidized employment programs (CETA) for the socio-economically disadvantaged of any race or gender

While the poor got begrudged decent safe housing by the middle class, the most affluent 20% of the American population received 60% of the federal housing subsidies in the form of property tax exemptions, mortgage interest deductions, and capital gains tax deferrals on home sales.

According to a 1990 report by the National Coalition for the Homeless, over half of all federally subsidized mortgages went to affluent people who could afford to buy homes without any help. Wealthy people who own beachfront properties that no insurer will insure due to hurricanes and coastal plane erosion, receive federally subsidized insurance — meaning that the taxpayers are liable for billions of dollars in insurance claims for property and casualty losses.

One of the beneficiaries was multi-millionaire George H. W. Bush, who regularly preached free market self-reliance. Most of the $400,000 worth of storm damage to Bush’s Maine vacation home was covered by federal insurance in 1991-1992.

Under the fearless direction of “Silent” Sam Pierce, Reagan’s HUD appointee, the lion’s share of HUD funds were redirected from low-income housing to the private sector for the enrichment of developers, banks, and real estate investors while the poor didn’t get any affordable decent housing at all.

Contractors and developers used federal assistance from HUD to build housing slated for the poor for merely a year or two in order to qualify for HUD funds, then flipped the properties to other buyers who were not held to the original contract under HUD; who evicted the poor and converted the units to upscale luxury rentals and condos for the middle and upper classes. Thus, the poor were shoved out entirely. Many were left homeless.

By the end of Reagan’s second term in 1988-1989, only one quarter of all poor US households got any kind of housing subsidy. Of the very few poor who get rent vouchers, half of them returned the vouchers unused because they couldn’t find any affordable housing.

Suckling from the public tit is apparently OK for the haves and have-mores, while those of us in poverty with no hope and no chance for any resemblance of a decent life are undeserving of anything — we’re just a social and economic nuisance who owe the middle and upper classes a debt of unrelenting suffering and misery for the “crime” of being born into “their” world.

Billions of dollars were cut from the food stamp program, college aid and other educational/training funding under Title IV (thanks to the Gramm-Ruddman bill passed in the late 1980’s), and from SSI — the miserly inadequate, but often the only, safety net for low-income disabled and elderly people otherwise ineligible for regular social security disability (SSDI) due to lack of enough prior earnings and social security credits.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was supposed to give disabled people a toehold in the job market so they could become economically self-sufficient and live with at least some dignity. But all the ADA ended up doing was dumping disabled people off of SSI while failing to require employers to hire them. As of 1995, over one third of those needing SSI were no longer getting helped. The ADA is more appropriately the Americans Who Have Been Discarded Act, because discarded is precisely what was done to millions of disabled Americans who are utterly destitute and homeless with no means of support, other than begging on the streets under constant threat of police brutality, harassment, and arrest.

Democrats in Congress throughout the Reagan-Bush I regimes and under the Clinton administration did absolutely nothing to abate or reverse these cuts, even after signing the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 into law; which put the onus of economic self-sufficiency squarely on the shoulders of those least able and least likely to get any opportunities at all.

The hunger, homelessness, malnutrition, and casualties of lack of medical and dental and vision care that skyrocketed in the Reagan Revolution was not abated under Clinton’s two terms in office.

The reductions or elimination of all these social programs under the guise of “tough love” and “personal responsibility” really amounted to a social Darwinist War On the Poor, with an agenda of “extermination by imposed destitution.” In more polite circles, this is called “Benign Neglect.” But make no mistake, there is nothing “benign” about it.

Those with the least opportunities, resources, and political clout were deliberately made to suffer the most while being kicked in the teeth by a large comfortably complacent middle class that consistently told the poor that if we weren’t making it, it was our own damn fault.

We got told that it’s our own fault for failing to be good enough, able-bodied enough, smart enough, educated enough, thin enough, young enough, physically attractive enough, and hard-working enough.

We got told to “shut up and stop whining” — nobody wanted to hear about our problems, and that the poor in far away lands have it so much worse than those of us here who go hungry, homeless, jobless, and without health care here on American soil.

We got told that “there are plenty of jobs out there for anybody willing to work” — yet no one stepped up to the plate and offered us their middle class jobs while they easily got another one, or expressed a willingness to hire us in entry level jobs at a living wage with health benefits.

On the eve of the signing of the Welfare Reform Act in 1996, there were 14 million recipients of AFDC. Of those, 5 million were families, almost all of whom were single mothers and children with no other means of support, no access to abortion (thanks to the Hyde Amendment) in the event of contraception failure, and no equal opportunity for good-paying “men’s jobs.” Less than 1% of the AFDC recipients were able-bodied men.

Yet, reductions in benefits and the elimination of “welfare as we know it” was defended as a way of throwing “baby makers” and lazy “leeches” off the public dole.

Moving people off of welfare and into jobs is a noble idea — if society and government is committed to equal opportunity employment, a living wage, health care for all, and the guarantee of enough jobs for everyone in need of a job. Anything less than 100% employment — not 95%, but 100% — cannot deliver that.

The “Final Solution” For the Poor

After the five year lifetime limits under Welfare Reform were implemented, millions of poor women with children were booted off. Even during the “good times” of Clintonian prosperity, not all of these poorest and neediest hard-to-employ women were absorbed into the labor market and given jobs. But the government never bothered to track the whereabouts and situations of those women with the least chances of getting hired in jobs that pay a living wage.

Welfare was never an adequate solution to the problems inflicted on the poor by capitalism and eliminating “welfare as we know it” without providing alternative and reasonable economic opportunities is not merely a worse solution, it is the “Final Solution” for the poor. Anyone familiar with the politics of genocide knows what “Final Solution” means.

The War On the Poor was part and parcel for the implementation of a wholesale pogrom of “extermination through imposed destitution.”

Just like the fascist Nazi forebears of today’s corporatist class, the elite gained the support of a sizable portion of the middle class (who were overwhelmingly white males in male-dominated lucrative industries) via the ballot box in the carrying out of the “Final Solution” against the poor — 84% whom are women, children, and unborn fetuses that the “pro-life” arbiters of morality feign shambolic concern for.

Jacqueline S. Homan, author of Classism For Dimwits and Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie

14 Responses to “Classism and the Final Solution For the Poor”

And almost never does anyone talk about the deeper issue, beyond why do we not help the poor, to why should the poor NEED to be helped; why is society structured in such a way as to deny resources to much of the population? If you are starving and homeless, can you find a place to build a hut and plant a field for you and your family? No, you have to go begging, for some crap job, or to some charity, or to the government, or on the street, and probably get nothing but humiliation for your efforts, or even if you do get something, they’ve made you pay for it by taking away your most basic human right to be able to gather the resources to stand on your own two feet. They’ve taken away the respect due to you as a human being. They’ve made you a dependent, infantilized you.

And so many take this for granted as the way things should be, or as human nature, or as ‘reality’.

Once again, a stellar essay passes through these pages, and addressing these very important issues, the gutting of the working class and poor.
As we now notice, the middle class is finally “feeling the love” of the unforgiving capitalist system we on the bottom have been subjected to while the uppers lived oblivious to our plight, in fact, kicked us down when we tried to reach for those rungs we tried but were unable to grasp.

Those so-called stereotypes, i.e., “welfare queens” were just a way to grease the skids to throw us to the sharks in such a manner that there would be little to no chance any sympathetic working-classers close to, but above us, could resist the pull of the siren song of “Leave those losers alone, you’ve got better things to do”. Suffice to say, many of them fell for it, hook, line and sinker.

I recall seeing some mothers who fit some of the descriptive stereotypes, but I always knew that there was usually something that went awry well before they grew up and wound up on welfare. But I was also very aware that of the class of poor, single mothers there was a spectrum of types from all walks of life who wound up poor for varying reasons. Simply lumping them into one inert mass and treating them that way appeared to defy logic.

Never mind that mothering children IS work, sending out vast amounts of poor mothers into the workforce seemed extremely illogical, to say the least. I knew that a mother going to work under the best circumstances was a daunting task, but to order under do-or-die conditions, a disadvantaged mother to do the same was tortuous. I’d known of women who managed, with help and support, to get jobs and become somewhat upwardly mobile, but that was only due to the fact they’d had some kind of support and back-up to keep their kids and/or homes intact while they pursued their efforts.

And, Jacqeline, you are most correct when you tell us the government didn’t bother tracking where or how their actions affected us. Heard tell Gov. Tommy Thompson (who enacted the country’s first wave of welfare reform) of Wisconsin, vetoed a bill SIX TIMES to account for the aftereffects of said welfare reform. Wonder why, Tommy? So that the public or others interested could discover what a sham your plan really was? Smells like a rat…

Welfare was never meant as an “adequate solution”, rather, was a stopgap to quell resistance or social disorder in light of our blood-leeching capitalist system which needed a ready-but-desperate workforce available.
As far as “good-paying jobs”, as a poor mother seeking employment, I was willing to take even half-way decent, but part-time jobs, if they allowed me to be able to keep one long enough to either work my way upward while there, or eventually find a “better job”. Alas, I got neither option.
Half of them usually wound up being short-lived, due to their company’s in-failings, or there were never any higher positions to aspire to that didn’t involve being there for many years, or taking over a manager’s job hypothetically. Even so, none of the string of jobs I’d worked led me to anything more than the previous jobs. So much for upward mobility.
Most of all, I kept wondering if my college-degreed husband (eventually, ex) couldn’t manage to pull it off, how could I do it minus a business degree? Not bloody likely. It didn’t take long to realize no matter how well I’d conducted my life as a young person, marrying young, putting off children for six whole years, going to college, and working two years prior to having said child, that none of the above mattered a rat’s ass to TPTB or anyone I nor my husband shared DNA with. We were left to drown a slow, agonizing death, watching the cold, freezing water envelop us as we went down, deep, never to return.

The only bright light in all this was when I obtained my Section 8 voucher in 1987, the year after my daughter was born. I considered it a miracle, one that allowed me to live a slightly better quality of life while being a poor mom, raising my two children from my marriage in a decent dwelling in a half-way decent neighborhood. It made a difference in my and my children’s outlook, but didn’t replace the supports we should have had prior to my having to need it to begin with. And, as everyone knows, that Section 8 isn’t really subsidizing the recipient as it is subsidizing the landlord for simply owning property. Where else is their rent guaranteed?
Of the four landlords I’ve had under the program, three of them have been fairly decent folks, but still doesn’t remove this equation.

A friend of mine is ruing the occurrence of newly-poor middle classers now combing the thrift store racks in search of cheap clothing we poor have always depended on. We didn’t have credit cards to go shopping nor vehicles to get us to the mall or stow those ubiquitous designer shopping bags in. She sees them as direct competition for what we have been gleaning for in our lifetimes. It may seem petty and small-minded, but one can’t miss the irony; that is, now the middle-classers are now feeling the first sensations of the stabbing pain of the murky depths.

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I have loved your columns and they speak for themselves,i wonder in the US it also happens and here in kenya its the worst and the poor shall remain poor for ever,we look after you guys to grant us from poverty and here the majority are uneducated and this is what should be eradicated most. kind regards,GEORGE ALIWA.

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